


stay calm, soldier (and think of what you were taught)

by gatsbyparty



Series: Elysiumstuck [1]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, The Godhead Incident, pit fights, pretentious allusions, shortfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-05
Updated: 2012-08-05
Packaged: 2017-11-11 11:19:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/477977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatsbyparty/pseuds/gatsbyparty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave Strider, from a boy to a man. Elysiumstuck, although you don't need to have read of us your friends to get it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	stay calm, soldier (and think of what you were taught)

There is discipline in a soldier

you can see it when he walks,

There is honor in a soldier

you hear it when he talks.

- _A Soldier_ , Summer Sandercox

 

He’s a fairy light fire cracker boy, Dave. A fancy show and a burst of light, but small and shining and without substance. His bones are hollow as straws bent in the middle, shoulder blades long lines straining against his back like wings yearning to burst free, untamed fury seething below his skin, pop-snap fingers that flex restlessly. There is something of the desert in him, in words that spill free like sand off dunes, the lightning storm movement of his strifing with Rose.

Until adolescence, they can and do pretend to be each other. Voices similar in pitch, white blond hair clipped neatly against the scalp, and eyes the empty newness of a sky after storm clouds do nothing to distinguish them. They are taught to fight by the same man, the gifted warrior that fathered them and stays only until they reach the age of ten, so they move in the same way. Their mother is passable enough with a needle that they dress alike. They are worrisomely identical for fraternal twins. It makes the khorosi mutter darkly to themselves.

The day comes soon enough that Rose bleeds and Dave’s voice cracks. Rose is taken among the women’s tents (even though if questioned the entire village would deny such a custom remains; it should be a relic of the past) and things are explained. Dave is given a finer sword and sent among the sands. He returns at sunset with the head of a ghast. Rose spends three days in a dune with a flask of water and returns scorched clean from the inside, her eyes hollow and deeply bagged and a curious quirk to her mouth. They are defined outwardly at last.

Dave is not the Godhead. A man cannot host a Lady, and certainly not the Lady of Ladies, but if the cycle of the Godhead is taken as a breath, inhale and exhale, the Lady of Light pauses on him for the briefest of moments between inhale and exhale, when she has nearly burnt up his twin, and he catches like a wick. The universe curls into threads that he weaves with his fingers and heat races through him like he’s a line of gunpowder. A thousand songs of stars fill his ears. For a glorious sunburst of an instant he becomes the apex of creation, the pinwheel that rotates the worlds, and then gears and the smell of furnaces fractal inwards and he drops instead to the sand, sending up a plume as he hits. The desert is filled with the sound of Rose’s screams, long and tortured. Wisps of smoke curl off her skin. Dave lunges for her a second before her leg below the knee vanishes in a thunderclap and she stops howling.

“Dave,” she says, understandably a bit out of breath. “Your eyes are red and my leg doesn’t hurt a bit.”

That’s all she says before dropping into the sand, out cold. What worries Dave more is that her eyes are what can only be called purple.

+

The fighting pits are simple. They are actual pits, although more egg-shaped than a tunnel, with a few rows of seats above for the khorosi. The adulthood rites are not a spectator sport. To win, you must only draw blood. The fights do not end until a weapon is blood. In the case of the Strider-Lalondes, a peculiar case in itself in that both were sent in at once, both weapons must be blooded. Fourteen, Dave has begun to grow into his shoulders and hands, with a scant amount of muscle. Rose is smaller, slenderer about the torso but more stocky in the limbs.

Despite that, she’s knocked flat on her back after Crow gets in a single hit with his lathi at her metal knee. It’s still wobbly, even after a year, with wonky gyroscopics from a fourteen year old’s clumsy hands. Her gears are knocked into each other and she doesn’t get back up, but Dave darts back and around, flashstepping around the pit and pulling Crow into a tighter net until Rose lurches up onto her good knee and drives the Needles into his shoulders. He falls, pinioned, and Dave runs the edge of his sword across the back of Crow’s neck.

Dave tattoos blue circles on his sister’s palms that night, locking the circuit, keeping the edges of this Rose from fading into the center of a new Rose, and there will always be a reminder that one night he sat with his sister and mother in their home, the cat at their feet and the firelight alive in the dark. This remains, even when everything else goes to shit.

Dave struck the secondary blow, doesn’t earn himself a warrior’s colors, but when Mam is dead and they leave to Consequence City with nothing but their clothes and sandals, he finds himself a better place in this strange cage of a city. The walls rise high to keep them safe, the Archon’s grandson is coming into his own, the Lattice is both a cage and a shield, and there is a soldier’s welcome for a boy with big hands and a clever mind.


End file.
